The energy page on the new White House website, which went up within moments of Friday’s inauguration, reiterates the priorities Trump had voiced during the campaign, from focusing on “energy independence” to promising to scale back the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency.

It also appeared to remove any reference to combating climate change, a topic that had been featured prominently on the White House site under President Barack Obama. The page that once detailed the potential consequences of climate change and the Obama administration’s efforts to address it vanished on Friday just as President Trump was sworn in. It now redirected to a broken link: “The requested page ‘/energy/climate-change’ could not be found.”

In its place, listed among the top issues of the Trump administration, was a page entitled, “An America First Energy Plan.”

The incoming administration vows to eliminate “harmful and unnecessary policies” such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the United States rule. The first represents a variety of efforts President Obama pursued to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, while the second is a rule issued by the Environmental Protection Agency to protect not only the largest waterways but smaller tributaries that others believe should fall under the jurisdiction of states rather than the federal government.

The new White House site says that Trump would “refocus the EPA on its essential mission of protecting our air and water.”

It also says the incoming president will pursue “clean coal technology,” a reference to efforts to remove carbon dioxide emissions from coal-burning plants and bury those emissions in the ground to use them for enhance oil recovery. The Obama Energy Department has already been funding a variety of projects in this area, though without nearby enhanced oil recovery projects, the technology is not economic. Trump’s White House site says the new administration would aim at “reviving America’s coal industry.”

New York Times: Our Readers Are Too Dumb To Understand Global Warming Numbers

When I challenged him about the 'hottest year on record,' a New York Times reporter explained that his readers are too dumb to understand numbers.By Robert TracinskiJanuary 27, 2017

Quote:

I recently wrote about the wretched reporting on the claim that 2016 was the “hottest year on record,” using as my main example a New York Times article by Justin Gillis that gave his readers none of the relevant numbers they could use to evaluate that claim. None of them. If you search for the actual numbers, you will eventually find that the effect they are claiming, the actual amount by which this year was hotter than previous years, is smaller than the margin of error in the data.

Shortly afterward, I got a revealing response from Gillis. I’ll fill in all the details for you, because the whole thing is an important case study in why you can’t trust mainstream reporting on global warming. But let’s just cut to the chase. When I asked him why he didn’t include the basic numbers we need to understand his story, he gave me this reply:

DAVID ROSE: How can we trust global warming scientists if they keep twisting the truth By David Rose for The Mail on SundayPublished: 21:21 EST, 11 February 2017 | Updated: 04:59 EST, 12 February 2017

Quote:

They were duped – and so were we. That was the conclusion of last week’s damning revelation that world leaders signed the Paris Agreement on climate change under the sway of unverified and questionable data.

A landmark scientific paper –the one that caused a sensation by claiming there has been NO slowdown in global warming since 2000 – was critically flawed. And thanks to the bravery of a whistleblower, we now know that for a fact.

The response has been extraordinary, with The Mail on Sunday’s disclosures reverberating around the world. There have been nearly 150,000 Facebook ‘shares’ since last Sunday, an astonishing number for a technically detailed piece, and extensive coverage in media at home and abroad.

The Paris Agreement, a landmark scientific paper –the one that caused a sensation by claiming there has been NO slowdown in global warming since 2000 – was critically flawed

It has even triggered an inquiry by Congress. Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who chairs the House of Representatives’ science committee, is renewing demands for documents about the controversial paper, which was produced by America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the world’s leading source of climate data.

In his view, the whistleblower had shown that ‘NOAA cheated and got caught’. No wonder Smith and many others are concerned: the revelations go to the very heart of the climate change industry and the scientific claims we are told we can trust.

Remember, the 2015 Paris Agreement imposes gigantic burdens and its effects are felt on every household in the country. Emissions pledges made by David Cameron will cost British consumers a staggering £319 billion by 2030 – almost three times the annual budget for the NHS in England.

That is not the end of it. Taxpayers also face an additional hefty contribution to an annual £80 billion in ‘climate aid’ from advanced countries to the developing world. That is on top of our already gargantuan aid budget. Green levies and taxes already cost the average household more than £150 a year.

The contentious paper at the heart of this furore – with the less than accessible title of Possible Artifacts Of Data Biases In The Recent Global Surface Warming Hiatus – was published just six months before the Paris conference by the influential journal Science.

It made a sensational claim: that contrary to what scientists have been saying for years, there was no ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the early 21st Century.

Indeed, this ‘Pausebuster’ paper as it has become known, claimed the rate of warming was even higher than before, making ‘urgent action’ imperative.

There can be no doubting the impact of this document. It sat prominently in the scientific briefings handed out to international negotiators, including EU and UK diplomats.

An official report from the European Science Advisory Council stated that the paper had ‘refined the corrections in temperature records’ and shown the warming rate after 2000 was higher than for 1950-99.

So, flawed as it was, the Pausebuster paper unquestionably helped persuade world leaders to sign an agreement that imposes massive emissions cuts on developed countries.

No wonder, then, that our revelations were met with fury by green propagandists. Some claimed the MoS had published ‘fake news’. One scientist accused me of becoming the ‘David Irving of climate change denial’ – a reference to the infamous Holocaust denier.

Yet perhaps more damaging is the claim from some in the green lobby that our disclosures are small beer. In fact, their importance cannot be overstated. They strike at the heart of climate science because they question the integrity of the global climate datasets on which pretty much everything else depends.

The whistleblower is a man called Dr John Bates, who until last year was one of two NOAA ‘principal scientists’ working on climate issues. And as he explained to the MoS, one key concern is the reliability of new data on sea temperatures issued in 2015 at the same time as the Pausebuster paper.

It turns out that when NOAA compiled what is known as the ‘version 4’ dataset, it took reliable readings from buoys but then ‘adjusted’ them upwards – using readings from seawater intakes on ships that act as weather stations.

They did this even though readings from the ships have long been known to be too hot.

No one, to be clear, has ‘tampered’ with the figures. But according to Bates, the way those figures were chosen exaggerated global warming.

And without this new dataset there would have been no Pausebuster paper. If, as previous sea water evidence has shown, there really has been a pause in global warming, then it calls into question the received wisdom about its true scale.

Then there is the matter of timing. Documents obtained by this newspaper show that NOAA, ignoring protests by Dr Bates, held back publication of the version 4 sea dataset several months after it was ready – to intensify the impact of the Pausebuster paper. It also meant more sceptical voices had no chance to examine the figures.

Our revelations showed there was another problem with the Pausebuster paper – it used an untested experimental version of the dataset recording temperatures on land, which had not been properly archived and made accessible to other scientists.

This was a fundamental breach of mandatory rules under NOAA’s Climate Data Records programme, which Bates had devised. Is it sharp practice? Certainly it carries the stench of ‘Climategate’ in 2009, when leaked emails showed scientists colluding to hide data and weaknesses in their arguments.

It is important to acknowledge the MoS did make one error: the caption on a graph, showing the difference between NOAA’s sea data records and the UK Met Office’s, did not make clear that they used different baselines. We corrected this immediately on our website.

The only ‘fake news’ in our revelations is the claim that they don’t matter.

In truth, they are hugely damaging, for they suggest an agreement made by figures such as Barack Obama and David Cameron rested in part on research that had not been published with integrity.

This is an age where many have come to question the role of experts. Restoring trust demands transparency.

In climate science, this means being open about the fact there are still critical uncertainties: not about the basic proposition that the world is warming, thanks in part to humans, but about the speed at which this is happening; and when it is likely, left unchecked, to become truly dangerous.

Al Gore famously said: ‘The science is settled.’ It is not.

We cannot allow such a vital issue for our future to be mired in half truths and deceptions.

The White House is pushing for significant cuts to EPA programs and staff levels, giving a glimpse of how the Trump administration plans on devolving more control to the states.

The budget plan sent from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to EPA leadership calls for eliminating dozens of programs, including at least 16 that have to do with global warming and implementing former President Barack Obama’s climate agenda.

OMB also requested a 30 percent cut in grants to states and a 20 percent reduction in EPA’s workforce through buy-outs and layoffs. In total, President Donald Trump is calling for a roughly 25 percent cut to EPA’s budget — about $2 billion.

The cuts are laid out in a letter sent by William Becker, the executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies (NACAA), to his group’s member state and local regulators. Becker said NACAA received the “pass back” budget information sent from OMG to EPA Monday, according to InsideEPA.

Democrats and environmentalists have opposed Trump’s budget cuts, and EPA union leaders are hemming and hawing about cutting staffing levels. Even some Republicans aren’t on board with cutting so much from EPA’s budget.

“They are operating at 1989 staffing levels. So you really want to be sure you are not cutting the meat and muscle with the fat,” Oklahoma Republican Rep. Tom Cole, who is on the House Committee on Appropriations, told Inside EPA.

“There’s not that much in the EPA, for crying out loud,” California Republican Rep. Mike Thompson told The Washington Post. Thompson formerly chaired the appropriations committee’s subcommittee dealing with EPA.

What’s unsurprising is Trump wants to get rid of more than a dozen global warming programs at EPA, including funding to implement the Clean Power Plan (CPP)

Trump promised to repeal Obama’s “Climate Action Plan” — the CPP is the linchpin of the former president’s climate agenda. The CPP limits carbon dioxide emissions from new and existing power plants.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt helped lead a coalition of 28 states to overturn the rule while he was attorney general of Oklahoma. Trump is preparing to sign an executive order to rescind the CPP, so it’s not surprising they’d cut funding for its implementation.

WaPo reported EPA’s “Office of Research and Development could lose up to 42 percent of its budget, according to an individual apprised of the administration’s plans.”

The budget plan “eliminates funding altogether for the office’s ‘contribution to the U.S. Global Change Research Program,’” according to WaPo.

One area of concern, however, is the reduction in state and tribal grants for infrastructure and environmental clean-up. The Environmental Council of the States (ECS) sent a letter to EPA and OMB urging them not to cut those programs.

ECS wrote that “cuts to [state and tribal] categorical grants, or to EPA programs operated by states, will have profound impacts on states’ ability to implement the core environmental programs as expected by our citizens.”

More than 90 percent of EPA programs are carried out by state environmental regulators. That’s something that concerns Pruitt, who promised to push back against OMB and preserve grants to states.

“I am concerned about the grants that have been targeted, particularly around water infrastructure, and those very important state revolving funds,” Pruitt told E&E News Tuesday.

“What’s important for us is to educate OMB on what the priorities of the agency are, from water infrastructure to Superfund, providing some of those tangible benefits to our citizens,” Pruitt said, “while at the same time making sure that we reallocate, re-prioritize in our agency to do regulatory reform to get back within the bounds of Congress.”

President Trump’s actions to rein in the EPA on a number of fronts involves the usual tension between environment and prosperity. Trump has rightly asserted that we can have both a relatively clean environment and prosperity, but this falls on deaf ears in the environmental community. His actions are painted as Republican’s desire to harm your children, because a more polluted environment is claimed to be worse for human health and welfare than achieving a cleaner environment.

But such assertions must be rejected, and forcefully. Because exactly the opposite is true — at least in an America which is already pretty clean.

Let me give you a simple example. Let’s say you pay to have your house cleaned once a week, and for a reasonable price the house is 90% cleaner each time.

Now let’s say you decide you want your house 99% cleaner on a continuous basis. Cleaner is better, right?

You have crews come in and work for hours every day, cleaning every surface with disinfectant. You buy the best air and water filtration systems. The cost goes up dramatically, and as a result you can no longer afford, say, the health care you once could afford before.

Then your young child falls ill from something she picked up at daycare. You figure she will probably be OK, kids get sick all the time, and you don’t take her to the doctor.

But this time it’s something more insidious. A rare disease left untreated leads to the rapid formation of an aneurysm in her coronary artery. Several years later she dies at a young age.

All because you wanted your house cleaner.

You might think this example is outlandish. Well, in the past week one of my grandsons was diagnosed with this disease. But since America has invested a great deal of money in our health care system, rather than wasting it on green energy schemes, it was caught in time.

In a theoretical sense, we can always work to make the environment “cleaner”, that is, reduce human pollution. So, any attempts to reduce the EPA’s efforts will be viewed by some as just cozying up to big, polluting corporate interests. As I heard one EPA official state at a conference years ago, “We can’t stop making the environment ever cleaner”.

The question no one is asking, though, is “But at what cost?”

It was relatively inexpensive to design and install scrubbers on smokestacks at coal-fired power plants to greatly reduce sulfur emissions. The cost was easily absorbed, and electricty rates were not increased that much.

The same is not true of carbon dioxide emissions. Efforts to remove CO2 from combustion byproducts have been extremely difficult, expensive, and with little hope of large-scale success.

There is a saying: don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

In the case of reducing CO2 emissions to fight global warming, I could discuss the science which says it’s not the huge problem it’s portrayed to be — how warming is only progressing at half the rate forecast by those computerized climate models which are guiding our energy policy; how there have been no obvious long-term changes in severe weather; and how nature actually enjoys the extra CO2, with satellites now showing a “global greening” phenomenon with its contribution to increases in agricultural yields.

But it’s the economics which should kill the Clean Power Plan and the alleged Social “Cost” of Carbon. Not the science.

There is no reasonable pathway by which we can meet more than about 20% of global energy demand with renewable energy…the rest must come mostly from fossil fuels. Yes, renewable energy sources are increasing each year, usually because rate payers or taxpayers are forced to subsidize them by the government or by public service commissions. But global energy demand is rising much faster than renewable energy sources can supply. So, for decades to come, we are stuck with fossil fuels as our main energy source.

The fact is, the more we impose high-priced energy on the masses, the more it will hurt the poor. And poverty is arguably the biggest threat to human health and welfare on the planet.

But isn’t it true that renewable energy such as solar and wind actually employ more people than the fossil fuel business? Yes, but once again there is a basic economic concept people need to keep in mind. We could put all of our unemployed people to work tomorrow by having them dig holes in the ground and filling them up again.

Yet, what would that do to increase prosperity? In order to build wealth, jobs need to be efficiently producing goods and services that people want… not just moving dirt around. So, just because it takes more people to provide more expensive renewable energy that can’t meet our needs anyway… that’s not a good thing.

People want — and need — inexpensive energy to prosper. Energy is required for everything humans do. Everything. The more it costs, the less money we have available for other more pressing problems.

So, the elephant in the room no one is talking about is that fact that the Clean Power Plan (which Trump is trying to dismantle) will make poverty worse, and as a result more people will die. Expensive attempts to make things too clean will be worse for human health and welfare — not better.

And what would have been gained for all that extra expense? Even the EPA has admitted that President Obama’s plans for reducing CO2 emissions will have no measurable effect on global temperatures in this century… only hundredths of a degree reductions in global warming, even if the “consensus of scientists” theory is correct.

This is why Obama’s coal-killing efforts have been legitimately characterized as all pain for no gain.

So, this is an issue where we global warming “skeptics” have the moral high ground. Let’s take it and own it.

Do not accept the premise that everything the EPA wants to do is good for America. The EPA provided a useful service years ago when it required us to clean up our air and waterways. Now it is a bloated bureaucracy in a continuing search for relevancy. It wants to force us to make everything not just 90% cleaner, but 99% cleaner.

Global temperatures have dropped 0.5° Celsius in April according to Dr. Ryan Maue. In the Northern Hemisphere they plunged a massive 1°C . As the record 2015/16 El Nino levels off, the global warming hiatus aka “the pause” is back with a vengeance. He writes:

Quote:

Some good news to end April, global temperature anomaly has fallen to only +0.1°C today (snapshot) … graphic is like stock market trace

Global Ocean Temperatures Drop To Pre-El Nino Levels

Despite widespread denial among climate activists, a growing number of scientific research papers in recent months have confirmed the global warming hiatus, trying to explain its possible reasons (for the latest studies see here, here and here). The latest study claims that the Southern Ocean played a critical role in the global warming slowdown.

Dr. Roy Spencer says while there was a plunge at the surface, the lower troposphere is still holding warmth, but what is clear is that the effects of the El Niño are over:

The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for April, 2017 was +0.27 deg. C, up from the March, 2017 value of +0.19 deg. C (click for full size version):

The global, hemispheric, and tropical LT anomalies from the 30-year (1981-2010) average for the last 16 months are:

Behind the social justice interventionism of the Birkenstock wearing Brangelina Peacenik useful-idiot-crowd, there’s the group of multinational financial interests who play the strings on the idiots.

Multinational corporations and billionaire financiers use climate change as a tool toward furtherance of collected global wealth. Their strategy is quite simple, and has been played out for several cycles. Create an institutional trade instrument (housing financial bubble example), control it, drive the pricing to an apex and reap the financial rewards.

Their expressed holy grail for human control is a global tax on all people more commonly known as a “carbon-trading tax”. A planetary tax on personage. Various religious groups have a financial method to purchase entry to heaven called ‘indulgences’. Hence the comparison of Climate Change to a religion is exponentially accurate.

The “Carbon Trading” fundamental financial instrument is the foundational block of the financial interests behind modern climate change. The latest exhibition of a decades long series of international construct was the Paris Climate Change agreement.

Quote:

REUTERS – Investors with more than $15 trillion of assets under management urged governments led by the United States to implement the Paris climate accord to fight climate change despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to pull out.

“As long-term institutional investors, we believe that the mitigation of climate change is essential for the safeguarding of our investments,” according to the letter signed by 214 institutional investors and published on Monday.

“We urge all nations to stand by their commitments to the Agreement,” it said. Signatories of the letter included the California Public Employees Retirement System and other pension funds from Sweden to Australia.

The letter was addressed to governments of the Group of Seven, before a summit in Italy on May 25-26, and to leaders of the Group of 20 who will meet in Germany in July.

Trump is due to announce in coming days whether he will carry out a campaign threat to “cancel” the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims to limit a rise in temperatures by phasing out use of fossil fuels.

The European Union has been scrambling to persuade Trump, who wants to bolster the U.S. coal industry, to stick with the accord. His advisers have warned of legal problem if Washington stays but waters down its climate commitments.

It’s never about “climate”, or “planetary climate control” that’s a ridiculously silly exposition to even discuss amid any intellectual person unconnected to the payoff at the end of the climate rainbow. The real motive here is “control”… over people.

The climate changes. Go see the Grand Canyon, or dig up a dinosaur bone to see the reality of it. The state of Florida is sand and phosphate because it used to be completely under water. However, humans have no impact on the planets’ ability to change.

World Bank-backed report says revenue could be used in a number of ways, such as paying out household rebates, alleviating poverty and fostering low-carbon infrastructureIan JohnstonTuesday 30 May 2017 14:56 BST

A global carbon tax that would raise trillions of dollars if applied across the world should be introduced if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change, 13 leading economists have said in a new report.

Led by Professor Nicholas Stern, who produced the groundbreaking Stern Report in 2006, and Professor Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2001, the experts suggested a price for a tonne of carbon dioxide of $50 to $100 (£39-78) by 2030.

If implemented all over the world, the top price would raise about $4 trillion – more than the UK’s and Germany’s gross domestic products, but less than Japan’s – although the report suggested poorer countries might charge less.

Currently about 85 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions are not subject to a tax – while the fossil fuel sector receives subsidies of up to an estimated $5.3 trillion. The world’s largest carbon pricing scheme is in the EU, but it only charges about $6.70.

The High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices’ report, which was supported by the World Bank and France, said the money raised could be used in a variety of ways – such as making payments directly to citizens.

“The revenue can be used to foster growth in an equitable way, by returning the revenue as household rebates, supporting poorer sections of the population, managing transitional changes, investing in low-carbon infrastructure, and fostering technological change,” they said.

“Ensuring revenue neutrality via transfers and reductions in other taxes could be a policy option.”

And the benefits would not simply come from reducing the risk of global warming hitting two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels – the point at which scientists believe it will get particularly dangerous – with the economists highlighting the benefits of cleaner air, reduced congestion and healthier ecosystems.

The report described climate change as “an urgent and fundamental challenge”.

“The goal of stabilising the temperature increase well under 2C is largely motivated by concerns over the immense potential scale of economic, social, and ecological damages that could result from the failure to manage climate change effectively,” it said.

This would require the “large-scale transformation” of human activities, affecting electricity generation, industrial processes, heating and cooling, transportation, agriculture and the way we live in general.

“However, climate policies, if well designed and implemented, are consistent with growth, development, and poverty reduction,” the economists added.

“The transition to a low-carbon economy is potentially a powerful, attractive, and sustainable growth story, marked by higher resilience, more innovation, more liveable cities, robust agriculture, and stronger ecosystems.”

The report called for the world to start cutting state subsidies for oil, coal and gas.

“Reducing fossil fuel subsidies is another essential step toward carbon pricing – in effect, these subsidies are similar to a negative emissions price,” it said.

And the economists stressed the urgency of implementing their recommendations.

“As carbon-pricing mechanisms take time to develop, countries should begin doing so immediately,” they wrote.

Now that the idea of a global warming Red Team approach to help determine what our energy policy should be is gaining traction, it is important that we understand what that means to some of us who have been advocating it for over 10 years — and also what it doesn’t mean.

The Red Team approach has been used for many years in private industry, DoD, and the intelligence community to examine very costly decisions and programs in a purposely adversarial way…to ask, what if we are wrong about a certain program or policy change? What might the unintended consequences be?

In such a discussion we must make sure that we do not conflate the consensus on a scientific theory with the need to change energy policy, as is often done. (Just because we know that car wrecks in the U.S. cause 40,000 deaths a year doesn’t mean we should outlaw cars; and I doubt human-caused climate change has ever killed anyone).

While science can help guide policy, it certainly does not dictate it.

In the case of global warming and the role of our carbon dioxide emissions, the debate has too long been dominated by a myopic view that asserts the following 5 general points as indisputable. I have ordered them generally from scientific to economic.

1) global warming is occurring, will continue to occur, and will have dangerous consequences

2) the warming is mostly, if not totally, caused by our CO2 emissions

3) there are no benefits to our CO2 emissions, either direct (biological) or indirect (economic)

4) we can reduce our CO2 emissions to a level that we avoid a substantial amount of the expected damage

5) the cost of reducing CO2 emissions is low enough to make it worthwhile (e.g. mandating much more wind, solar, etc.)

ALL of these 5 points must be essentially true for things like the Paris Agreement (which President Trump has now withdrawn us from…for the time being) to make much sense.

But I would argue that each of the five points can be challenged, and not just with “fake science”. There is peer-reviewed and published analysis in science and economics that would allow one to contest each one of the five claims.

The Red Team Approach: It’s NOT a Redo of the Blue Team

John Christy and I are concerned that the Red Team approach, if applied to global warming, will simply be a review of the U.N. IPCC science on global warming. We are worried that it will only address the first two points (warming will continue, and it is mostly caused by CO2). Heck, even *I* believe we will continue to see modest warming, and that it might well be at least 50% due to CO2.

But a Red Team reaffirming those points does NOT mean we should “do something” about global warming.

To fully address whether we should, say, have regulations to reduce CO2 emissions, the Red Team must address all 5 of the “consensus” claims listed above, because that is the only way to determine if we should change energy policy in a direction different from that which the free market would carry it naturally.

The Red Team MUST address the benefits of more CO2 to global agriculture, “global greening” etc.

The Red Team MUST address whether forced reductions in CO2 emissions will cause even a measurable effect on global temperatures.

The Red Team MUST address whether the reduction in prosperity and increase in energy poverty are permissible consequences of forced emissions reductions to achieve (potentially unmeasurable) results.

The membership of the Red Team will basically determine the Team’s conclusions. It must be made up of adversaries to the Blue Team “consensus”, which has basically been the U.N. IPCC. If it is not adversarial in membership and in mission, it will not be a real Red Team.

As a result, the Red Team must not be allowed to be controlled by the usual IPCC-affiliated participants.

Only then can its report can be considered to be an independent, adversarial analysis to be considered along with the IPCC report (and other non-IPCC reports) to help guide U.S. energy policy.

On June 2, 2017, in a Letter regarding US withdrawal from Paris climate agreement addressed to the MIT community, Professor Rafael Reif, president of MIT, criticized President Trump’s decision to exit the Paris Climate Accords. In this refutation, we propose to clarify the scientific understanding of the Earth’s climate and to dispel the expensively fostered popular delusion that man-made global warming will be dangerous and that, therefore, the Paris Agreement would be beneficial.

Professor Reif wrote, “Yesterday, the White House took the position that the Paris climate agreement – a landmark effort to combat global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions – was a bad deal for America.”

There is no science unambiguously establishing that CO2 is the chief cause of the warming observed since the end of the Little Ice Age. The opposite has been repeatedly demonstrated. Ice cores have revealed that changes in CO2 concentration follow, rather than precede, changes in temperature. During the last deglaciation, the latest high-resolution records show atmospheric CO2 lagging temperature by 50 to 500 years. Our enterprises and industries return to the air some of the CO2 that was formerly present there, and some warming may be expected. That warming will be small and beneficial.

Professor Humlum and colleagues have demonstrated that changes in CO2 concentration follow changes in temperature after about 8-11 months. The time-lag between changes in temperature and consequent changes in CO2 concentration are caused by outgassing of CO2 from the oceans when they warm and uptake by the oceans as they cool. In addition, the growth rate of the atmospheric CO2 has been slowing recently, linked to an enhanced terrestrial biosphere uptake. Our contribution to atmospheric CO2 adds to the effect of these fluctuations, but it does not add much. One of us (Harde 2017) has reached similar conclusions.

Professor Reif’s assertion that global temperatures can be regulated by an international agreement to atone for our sins of emission is, therefore, at odds with scientific knowledge regarding cause and effect. King Canute’s warning to his English courtiers in 1032 A.D. that even the divinely anointed monarch could not command sea level should be heeded by bombastic intergovernmental agencies a millennium later. The professor’s assertion is, moreover, logically invalid, since the Paris agreement permits China and India to industrialize without limit on their emissions.

Besides, the Paris agreement is not binding. Under its terms, no nation is compelled to sin no more, and many – even including Germany and Denmark, the leaders in renewable energies – now appear unlikely to meet the agreement’s targets. The Paris agreement is, in practice, a political tool for suppressing growth and redistributing wealth. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, former chairman of the IPCC, said, in resigning in 2015, that the environment was his “religion,” and Ms. Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change until last year, openly stated in 2015 that the goal was to overturn capitalism — in her words, “to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution.”

There's a bunch more in this article that I'm not going to copy and paste but you can go HERE and read the rest!

A new study found adjustments made to global surface temperature readings by scientists in recent years “are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”

“Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming,” according to a study published June 27 by two scientists and a veteran statistician.

The peer-reviewed study tried to validate current surface temperature datasets managed by NASA, NOAA and the UK’s Met Office, all of which make adjustments to raw thermometer readings. Skeptics of man-made global warming have criticized the adjustments.

Climate scientists often apply adjustments to surface temperature thermometers to account for “biases” in the data. The new study doesn’t question the adjustments themselves but notes nearly all of them increase the warming trend.

Basically, “cyclical pattern in the earlier reported data has very nearly been ‘adjusted’ out” of temperature readings taken from weather stations, buoys, ships and other sources.

In fact, almost all the surface temperature warming adjustments cool past temperatures and warm more current records, increasing the warming trend, according to the study’s authors.

“Nearly all of the warming they are now showing are in the adjustments,” Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, a study co-author, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview. “Each dataset pushed down the 1940s warming and pushed up the current warming.”

“You would think that when you make adjustments you’d sometimes get warming and sometimes get cooling. That’s almost never happened,” said D’Aleo, who co-authored the study with statistician James Wallace and Cato Institute climate scientist Craig Idso.

Their study found measurements “nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history,” which was “nearly always accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern.”

“The conclusive findings of this research are that the three [global average surface temperature] data sets are not a valid representation of reality,” the study found. “In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”

Based on these results, the study’s authors claim the science underpinning the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to regulate greenhouse gases “is invalidated.”

The new study will be included in petitions by conservative groups to the EPA to reconsider the 2009 endangerment finding, which gave the agency its legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Sam Kazman, an attorney with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), said the study added an “important new piece of evidence to this debate” over whether to reopen the endangerment finding. CEI petitioned EPA to reopen the endangerment finding in February.

“I think this adds a very strong new element to it,” Kazman told TheDCNF. “It’s enough reason to open things formally and open public comment on the charges we make.”

Since President Donald Trump ordered EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to review the Clean Power Plan, there’s been speculation the administration would reopen the endangerment finding to new scrutiny.

The Obama-era document used three lines of evidence to claim such emissions from vehicles “endanger both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations.”

D’Aleo and Wallace filed a petition with EPA on behalf of their group, the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council (CHECC). They relied on past their past research, which found one of EPA’s lines of evidence “simply does not exist in the real world.”

Their 2016 study “failed to find that the steadily rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 13 critically important temperature time series data analyzed.”

“In sum, all three of the lines of evidence relied upon by EPA to attribute warming to human GHG emissions are invalid,” reads CHCC’s petition. “The Endangerment Finding itself is therefore invalid and should be reconsidered.

Pruitt’s largely been silent on whether or not he would reopen the endangerment finding, but the administrator did say he was spearheading a red team exercise to tackle climate science.

Secretary of Energy Rick Perry also came out in favor of red-blue team exercises, which are used by the military and intelligence agencies to expose any vulnerabilities to systems or strategies.

Environmental activists and climate scientists largely panned the idea, with some even arguing it would be “dangerous” to elevate minority scientific opinions.

“Such calls for special teams of investigators are not about honest scientific debate,” wrote climate scientist Ben Santer and Kerry Emanuel and historian and activist Naomi Oreskes.

“They are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science,” the three wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed.

“Frankly, I think you could do a red-blue team exercise as part of reviewing the endangerment finding,” Kazman said.

Though Kazman did warn a red team exercise could be a double-edged sword if not done correctly. He worries some scientists not supportive of the idea could undermine the process from the inside and use it to grandstand.

“This collapse, I predicted would occur in 2015-16 at which time the summer Arctic (August to September) would become ice-free,” said Professor Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University.

Scientists who cancelled their Arctic expedition due to thick ice conditions haves an interesting excuse for why they had to abandon their research project — climate change.

“We’re doing a large-scale climate change study and before we can even get going on it, climate change is conspiring to force us to cancel that study,” David Barber, a University of Manitoba scientist who lead the expedition, told The Guardian Wednesday.

Barber’s expedition set out in late May after being caught in 25-foot thick ice off the northern coast of Newfoundland. The expedition was forced to turn back after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for a four-year project to study the effects of global warming on Hudson Bay.

Now, Barber and fellow researchers are blaming their botched expedition on global warming, or climate change, as they call it.

Their evidence? Not much, except the opinions of some scientists involved — at least, The Guardian didn’t present any evidence otherwise. The paper just assumed climate change was the culprit.

Interestingly enough, The Guardian blamed a similar event in 2013 as a product of “weather” and not “climate change.” That year, a Russian icebreaker carrying scientists ended up stuck in thick Antarctic sea ice.

“It’s not something you would expect to see there and not something we’ve seen there before,” Barber said. “In the high Arctic, climate change is causing the ice to get thinner and there to be less of it. What that does is that it increases the mobility of ice.”

Scientists studied the ice around them while they were stuck. They noticed lots of multi-year ice more common closer to the North Pole. However, what happened to scientists could be a weather-related event.

Scientists are expected to set out again in early July, but their study will no doubt be delayed.

“We’re very poorly prepared for climate change,” Barber said. “We pay lip service to the fact that we think we know it’s coming and society is trying to grapple with the complexity of it, but when it really comes down to brass tacks, our systems are ill prepared for it.”

This isn’t the first time scientists have been stymied by thick Arctic sea ice. Despite the overall decline in sea ice since the late 1970s, the Polar Ocean Challenge found itself caught in thick ice in July 2016.

The voyage’s purpose was to show “that the Arctic sea ice coverage shrinks back so far now in the summer months that sea that was permanently locked up now can allow passage through.” The ship got stuck off the coast of Murmansk, Russia.

The year before, a scientific mission to the Arctic was derailed by thick ice. The ice breaker carrying researchers had to be diverted to save supply ships stuck in ice in Hudson Bay.

In 2013, the Russian icebreaker Akademik Shokalskiy got stuck in sea ice off Antarctica while carrying scientists to study how global warming was affecting the South Pole. The Guardian blamed that instance on “weather” and not “climate change.”

Asked in an interview on CNBCs “Squawk Box” whether he believed that carbon dioxide was “the primary control knob for the temperature of the Earth and for climate”, Perry said that “No, most likely the primary control knob is the ocean waters and this environment that we live in.” Perry added that “the fact is this shouldn’t be a debate about, ‘Is the climate changing, is man having an effect on it?’ Yeah, we are. The question should be just how much, and what are the policy changes that we need to make to effect that?”

(Most of the headlines I’ve seen on the CNBC interview, including the WaPo piece, refer to Perry with the usual “denier” terms.)

Basically, Perry is saying he believes that nature has a larger role than humans in recent warming. I, too, believe that the oceans might well be a primary driver of climate change, but whether the human/nature ratio is 50/50, or less, or more than that is up for debate. We simply don’t know.

So, while Sec. Perry goes against the supposed consensus of scientists, it was not outlandish, it wasn’t a denial of a known fact.

It was a valid opinion on an uncertain area of science.

AMS, me thinks thou doth protest too much

In response to Sec. Perry’s comments, the Executive Director of the AMS, Keith Seitter, said this in his letter to Perry (emphasis added):

While you acknowledged that the climate is changing and that humans are having an impact on it, it is critically important that you understand that emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are the primary cause. This is a conclusion based on the comprehensive assessment of scientific evidence. It is based on multiple independent lines of evidence that have been affirmed by thousands of independent scientists and numerous scientific institutions around the world. We are not familiar with any scientific institution with relevant subject matter expertise that has reached a different conclusion. These indisputable findings have shaped our current AMS Statement on Climate Change, which states: “It is clear from extensive scientific evidence that the dominant cause of the rapid change in climate of the past half century is human-induced increases in the amount of atmospheric greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2), chlorofluorocarbons, methane, and nitrous oxide.”

Indisputable findings? Really? In my opinion, the AMS view (which draws upon the U.N. IPCC view) is much more definitively stated than the evidence warrants.

Sure, all of the scientific institutions are going to jump on the bandwagon, with politically savvy committees agreeing with each other; they are in effect being paid by the government to agree with the consensus through billions of dollars in grants and contracts.

If there is no global warming crisis, there would be little congressional funding to study it, and thousands of climate-dependent careers (including mine) simply wouldn’t exist.

That money also trickles down to the AMS, which is paid to hold scientific conferences, workshops, and publish the resulting research studies in scientific journals. They have a vested interest in the gravy train continuing.

So, maybe I can ask the AMS: Just what percentage of recent warming was natural in origin? None? 10%? 40%? How do you know? Why was the pre-1940 warming rate — caused by Mother Nature — almost as strong as recent warming?

The truth is, no one knows just how much of recent warming was human-caused, including those thousands of “independent” scientists. They pin the blame on CO2 partly because that’s all they can think of, and we still don’t understand natural sources of climate change.

Besides, in the climate business, there are no thousands of independent scientists, anyway. They live and work in an echo chamber, and very few of them have the breadth and depth of knowledge to make an informed judgement on the issue. The vast majority are specialists in some narrow field of research. They go along to get along… and to continue to get funding.

Young climate researchers today cannot voice any doubts about anthropogenic global warming, or they might not have a career. They can’t go to Big Energy for research funding because, as far as I know, such funding does not exist. Big Energy knows they don’t have to pay people to prop up petroleum, natural gas, and coal, because the world runs on the stuff, and for the foreseeable future there are no large-scale, cost-effective, reliable, and readily dispatchable alternatives.

What we DO know with considerable confidence is that increasing CO2 should cause some warming. I’ll admit that my opinion here is mostly based upon a theoretical extrapolation from laboratory measurements of how CO2 absorbs and emits infrared energy. But we really don’t know how much warming. We certainly do not have enough confidence to claim it is indisputable that our greenhouse gas emissions are the dominant cause, as the AMS letter claims.

I am ashamed that the climate research community allows such pronouncements to be made. The AMS became a global warming advocacy group many years ago, and as a result it lost a lot of established members, including myself.